peter
nesteruk (home page:
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Chinese Gardens IX (Left and Right; Narrative
and Moral)
Chinese landscape painting begins with religion, with
the depiction of a Daoist paradise. The continuous echo of this relation, like
the persistence of the sound of the ‘sea’ in a shell, in the history of Chinese
landscape art is indeed hard to avoid. In terms of the kinds of temporality
locatable in the artwork, above all the rhetoric of eternity as a sublime
relation, this persistence of paradise comes as no surprise to the Western art
lover as the zoning employed resembles that of the sacred symbolism as found in
the history of Western Art. Not least in the importance accorded to the top and
background. Moreover the path (the Way) in landscape art, the path we follow
with our hearts and our souls as with our eyes, is often a slow climbing hypsosis
(eye-leading upwards), a zig-zag rising, taking us up to the top (of the
painting) and beyond…
But to where do we climb? And by what route? For the
direction of movement of time in Western art (most typically in the depiction
of narrative western medieval through to Baroque art) prefers left to right,
which we can call Left /Right (Narrative); offering the subjective viewpoint,
where the point of view of the viewer is paramount, superior even to time, at
times, which he or she stands above, seeing time in its many stages, past
present and future all at once, before us on the screen. Yet, if the direction
of narrative in western art is from (our) left to right (as with our direction
of writing) then in the East (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand
Laos, Cambodia...) the direction of time was (until recently) from right to
left, as evinced by the scroll tradition which unfolds from (our) right to
left. Unfolding the scroll we follow the line of narrative (as also the
direction of reading, first from top to bottom as in before and after in
Chinese language, shang/上 to xia/下 , equivalent to above and below, and then from right
to left). The route taken then should be from right to left. And the place to
which they head? Logically to the top left corner, both in the direction upward
and in the right to left narrative direction favoured by the East - including
the gaze of the eye of the seated watcher within the image, which also most
often (at least in the painting predating the spread of Western influence)
traverses right to left and looks upwards.
If
narrative directionality in Eastern and Western Art appears to proceed from
opposite poles, then the other left/right coding to be found in the image, which
gives us the place of the Good and the Holy, and so which we shall call
Left/Right (Moral), appears to be the same in both cultures, favouring the
(our) top left of the picture corner – often showing itself in the dominance of
peaks or heavenly palaces (or, in Western art, the hand or eye of God, as in
the Annunciation genre). But why in a right-handed culture (and all cultures
are right-handed) should the favoured portion of the picture be on our left?
The
answer lies in a one hundred and eighty degree shift in perspective. This
second left/right coding, that of Left/Right (Moral), finds its origin the
world of the statue, in the three dimensional world of right-handedness. No
matter we stand before it, the statue’s right hand is dominant, carries the
spear or orb, or scroll. Whence its place on the (our) left of the picture, so
going against our -intuitive- sense of the left as lesser or tabooed hand or
corner, but occupying the place of the object’s Right (hand). As if we were
again before the statue of the entity of power or religion – and so in thrall
to their (dominant) sense of left and right. So in art throughout the world,
with the exception of places where left and right must bow to the dictates of
space (narrative and face-on representations in tunnels leading to somewhere)
peaks peak on our left (the image’s right). The eye raising lines of approach
culminate in a lofty left of centre peak (this a how, from the point of view of
the perceiving subject, the left hand side of the picture is found to be the
place of the gods despite the taboo on, or lesser priority of, the left hand
side in culture in general – because this position is classified, and
experienced, as the image’s, that is the object’s, right). So the right-to-left
directionality of narrative fits in naturally with Left/Right (Moral or
Object Right) in the East; whilst in the West it sometimes forces a change of
narrative direction from left-to-right to right-to-left (where it is God that
is moved towards).
With
both modalities of left/right in the image in tension with each other. As when
the default right-to-left directionality of Eastern narrative is reversed in
caves containing a Buddha statue or complex of statuary, so -apparently-
following the Western model. However in reality the directionality has been switched
to prevent pilgrims and other participants from walking anti-clockwise around
the statues, to stop them following-on from the left hand side of the statue
(under taboo with left handedness). Instead they must move from left to right,
around the statues, that is clockwise, so necessitating the switch in narrative
directionality. Clearly the Left/Right (Moral) preference, the gaze of the
statues, has priority over the Right/Left (Narrative) directionality, the gaze
of the viewer.
Closing image. White glow on blue. The universality of
the ‘Windows’ operating system, present on the majority of our computers, and
so present on most of our screens. We notice, without any apparent surprise,
the light that shines from the top left-hand corner (its rays falling across
the screen to the bottom right). A light that shines before and after the
running of the other programmes; modest, yet there at the beginning and at the
end, a new default, new last word (final vision), featuring Western art
history’s favourite diagonal, (our) top left to bottom right, now globalised… a
ubiquitous presence on all our private screens.
Copyright 2006, Peter
Nesteruk